The man set to become one of the world’s youngest artificial intelligence billionaires started his entrepreneurial journey as a bored preteen living in Los Angeles.
When Ali Ansari was 12, living with his family in a single room at his aunt’s house in Woodland Hills, his immigrant mother told him to stop wasting time staring at his phone and try making money with it.
He took his father’s loafers and listed them on eBay for $50.
“My dad was like, ‘Why the hell did you sell my shoes?’ ” Ansari said. “My mom was like, excited.”
While it was a bad deal for his dad, Ansari learned the thrill of making money. He has been chasing it ever since.
He started biking around his neighborhood, visiting garage sales and thrift stores, buying whatever he could carry to sell online.
Through middle school, high school, and college in California, he continued to build online businesses, launching an AI business in his 20s that could make him a billionaire this year, his 25th.
His hard hustle in his young years is paying off more than he could have imagined. The success has given him the freedom to buy his parents a house and a nice car. He has been featured in the news and gets recognized by people in the business.
But the main change from his success so far, he says, is a huge increase in the amount of work and responsibility he has to shoulder.
“I feel very grateful and very stressed,” he said. “That kind of summarizes it.”
Ansari’s AI company is called Micro1. Making AI smarter requires vast amounts of data, as well as training and testing. Micro1 recruits and manages thousands of human experts — coders, lawyers, doctors, professors and financial analysts — to gather expert information that is fed to AI models like ChatGPT. These experts review and correct the AI’s output, making it more accurate.
Micro1 is one of the key suppliers of that kind of expert human assistance for AI, alongside California competitors Scale AI, Surge and Mercor.
Micro1 went from $4 million in annualized revenue in 2024 to $200 million today, according to Ansari. Even by Silicon Valley standards, that’s a meteoric rise.
Forbes estimates that Ansari is on the verge of becoming a billionaire, based on ongoing funding conversations that value Micro1 at $2.5 billion. Micro1 was last valued at $500 million.
Ansari has a booming voice, a fashionable buzz cut and a meticulously maintained beard. He’s fast with his fingers, usually responding immediately to text despite all he is juggling. He has the confidence of someone older, though his frequent use of the word “like” in conversation marks him as Gen Z.
His startup is based in Palo Alto and during monthly visits to Los Angeles, he works out of a coworking space in Woodland Hills — minutes away from his family, high school and the memories of his many teenage side hustles.
“This area is my entire childhood,” he said, gesturing out the window from his Woodland Hills office during an interview at the coworking space.
Ansari’s family emigrated to the U.S. when he was 10, after winning the rare U.S. green card lottery. Before the move, they had a comfortable life in a small beach town in northern Iran, where his father owned a kitchen cabinet factory.
Since the Islamic revolution of 1979, Iran has witnessed multiple waves of middle-class exodus, where Iranian immigrants moved to the U.S to escape economic collapse and persecution. The growing presence of the Persian diaspora in Westwood earned it the moniker Tehrangeles.
The family of four shared a single room at a relative’s house for the first year. His mother took a job at Target. The transition was rough for Ansari, who wasn’t fluent in English and often got in trouble for fooling around in school.
“Teachers would call my mom, and they’d be like, ‘Hey, your son’s making like, cow noises again’ or something,” he said.
At 14, he started reselling textbooks because they were easier to carry in his backpack. He figured out that procuring a steady supply of books through garage sales was hard, so he developed Cash Books Now, a website for college students to sell their textbooks. He would list them on Amazon at a 50% markup.
Buying and selling textbooks became his obsession. His bedroom wall was divided into two sections: “not listed” and “listed” to track inventory. By 16, Ansari had sold more than $100,000 in books.
“I would focus on this way more than school,” he said. “It was like the main hustle.”
In high school, he started a tutoring business that he later sold. In 2019, Ansari enrolled at UC Berkeley and started a software agency to build websites for small businesses.
Recruiting engineers to build the websites was taking up too much of his time, so he built an AI screening tool to help him with interviews. This later became Micro1, and his screening tool was used to track down, weed out and test all kinds of experts for training AI.
Still, the road to success was not without its rough patches. After raising $2 million in 2023, Ansari had a panic attack during a trip to visit his team in India.
“I kept kind of repeating this idea in my head, which was, like, some people have decided to give me millions of dollars,” he said. “And now I have this duty to really do something good with it.”
He got through it with the help of his family and reading, and has matured enough now to manage anxiety and lead with confidence.
“I am more composed than ever, and I frankly feel less anxious than ever,” he said.
Micro1’s annualized revenues surged more than 30-fold last year to $150 million. In early 2026, it crossed $200 million.
It has built a global workforce of contractors with various skills: from coders and comedians, to doctors and lawyers, to teach their skills to AI.
Ansari says leading such a fast-growing company at the heart of the hottest tech sector feels like being in a constant battle trying to meet demand, raise money and “punch back” against competitors trying to poach his employees.
He says he doesn’t have any hobbies besides work. He doesn’t watch television or movies but he devours business podcasts and personal stories of entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk.
Ansari is still adapting to the newfound fame and responsibilities. As the company’s valuation has climbed, Ansari bought his family a house in Woodland Hills. He recently hired a chief of staff to help with family and professional matters.
“I’m constantly choosing what I spend my time on, and it’s become the most difficult thing,” he said.
For future growth, Ansari is betting that demand for human training data will grow. He recently expanded Micro1 into robotics, recruiting roughly 1,000 people across 60 countries to record footage of themselves performing household tasks. The footage will be used to train robotic systems.
Ansari predicts that in the long run, human data will become a $1-trillion market — a projection he derives from the assumption that roughly 5% of all human labor will eventually be redirected toward training AI systems.
On a recent visit home, his father told him he should diversify into robots. When Ansari told him Micro1 had already started doing that, his father complained.
The man whose loafer launched an empire wanted a piece of the action this time.
“You stole my idea,” his father said. “You got to give me equity.”
The young Ansari hopes his success will uplift more than just his family.
“I might [become] the youngest Persian billionaire in the world,” he said. “I think I’ll inspire a lot of other Iranians, which kind of feels weird to say.”
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